News

12
Jan
2012

Cluster Services Built With FOSS

Built on the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) model for cluster deployments, LinuxForce staff has been hard at work over the past months developing and deploying LinuxForce Cluster Services built upon exclusively FOSS technologies and on December 15th we put out a press release:

Announcing LinuxForce Cluster Services

In September Laird Hariu wrote the article “File Servers – The Business Case for High Availability” where, in addition to building a case to use clusters, he also briefly outlined how Debian and other FOSS could be used to create a cluster for a file server. File servers are just the beginning, we have deployed clusters which host web, mail, DNS and more.

The core of this infrastructure uses Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) 64-bit and then depending upon the needs and budget of the customer, and whether they have a need for high availability, we use tools including Pacemaker, Corosync, rsync, drbd and KVM. Management of this infrastructure is handled remotely through the virtualization API libvirt using the virsh and Virtual Machine Manager.

The ability to use such high-quality tools directly from the repositories in the stable Debian distribution keeps our maintenance costs down, avoids vendor lock-in and gives companies like ours the ability offer these enterprise-level clustering solutions to small and medium size businesses for reasonable prices.

Posted by Elizabeth Krumbach in News, Systems Management, Virtualization, 0 comments
18
Jul
2011

Elizabeth Krumbach Keynoting at Fosscon in Philadelphia Saturday 23 July 2011

LinuxForce Systems Administrator, Elizabeth Krumbach will deliver the keynote address this Saturday, 23 July 2011 at FOSSCON. Her talk entitled “Make a Difference for Millions: Getting Involved with FOSS” will help attendees better understand how to contribute to the greater good by participating more actively in FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

FOSSCON will be held at Basekamp, 723 Chestnut street, 2nd floor; Philadelphia, PA. The doors open at 8 AM on Saturday. Elizabeth’s talk starts at 10 AM. The other talks follow her keynote. A listing of speakers at FOSSCON and the schedule is on-line here. Register to attend FOSSCON for free (no charge!) to learn about the excitement of FOSS in Philadelphia!

I am looking forward to the event. I hope to see you there!

LinuxForce is a sponsor of FOSSCON.

Posted by CJ Fearnley in Conference, FOSS Community, News, 0 comments
05
May
2011

Attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest

On Saturday, May 7th, I’ll be taking a flight out to Budapest, Hungary to attend the week-long Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) as the kick-off event to the development of the next Ubuntu release, 11.10 (code name Oneiric Ocelot) coming out in October 2011.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is the seminal Ubuntu event in which we define the focus and plans for our up-coming version of Ubuntu. The event pulls together Canonical engineers, community members, partners, ISVs, upstreams and more into an environment focused on discussion and planning.

My role at these summits as an Ubuntu Community Council member tends to be on community work, which includes recruitment and retention of volunteers to the Ubuntu community. I will also attend sessions related to upstream collaboration; most worthy of note are the collaboration sessions related to Debian as my primary development interest remains there. Debian is the parent distribution of Ubuntu, which LinuxForce almost exclusively deploys to our customers.

This will be my third time attending a UDS. I’m excited to see what I will learn, from the possibilities for the next release to the new ideas I will be able to apply in my day-to-day work. So much comes from such in-person collaborations with fellow contributors.

Posted by Elizabeth Krumbach in Conference, Development, FOSS Community, News, Ubuntu, 0 comments
25
Apr
2011

VIDEO: Elizabeth Krumbach on the SDForum Panel Discussion on Women and Open Source

On March 31, LinuxForce’s Elizabeth Krumbach participated in the SDForum panel discussion on “Tech Women: Women and Open Source”. There was a wide ranging discussion starting with a basic introduction to “open source” and how to get involved in open source. Other issues covered included special issues with the involvement of women, mentoring, business, and entrepreneurship. The Google Open Source Blog also reviewed the session.

Video of the panel discussion is online. Part 1 is 52 minutes.

Part 2 is 21 minutes.

Posted by CJ Fearnley in FOSS Community, News, 0 comments
23
Mar
2011

Debian Squeeze 6.0 Installation Over SSH

One of the great benefits of the Debian Installer is the ability to boot an ISO image, set up networking and complete an installation remotely via SSH (Secure Shell). You can use the following steps to get the installer launched.

Boot from the CD and in the Installer boot menu select “Advanced options >”

Select “Expert install”

The installer will load up and you will be presented with the Debian installer main menu.

If necessary set the default language and keyboard (you can reconfigure them later once you get this going over SSH if needed), and then select “Detect and mount CD-ROM”.

It then prompts you to load modules from USB storage, if you have drivers to load from USB you’ll want to accept. It then asks about PCMCIA resource range options, since our hardware didn’t require this we left it blank. Finally, if all goes well, you receive a confirmation screen saying that the CD-ROM detection was successful and that it contained the expected installation media.

The next option on the menu is “Load installer components from CD”, which you want to select. Browse the list, but for basic needs the only thing you need to load up is “network-console: Continue installation remotely using SSH”

Now you’ll need to get networking going. Select “Detect network hardware” and then “Configure the network”. In this step, in addition to basic networking, it will ask you to set a hostname and domain name.

Next you want to “Continue installation remotely using SSH” which will generate SSH host keys and have you set a remote installation password. Once it has these set up you will be presented with a screen giving you an installer@ipaddress location for the install and an SSH fingerprint. You or your remote technician will use these to SSH into the installer.

Finally, log in from your remote PC and complete the installation.

Note: It’s important to keep a solid connection established during the installation as the installer can behave poorly if you lose your connection and have to connect again. Also, try to avoid resizing the window while doing the install as redraws of the window to the new size can sometimes cause problems.

Posted by Elizabeth Krumbach in News, 6 comments
18
Mar
2011

Slides for my talk on “Automating X11 Keystrokes”

X11 is the graphical user interface most widely used on Linux operating systems. My slides and video demo for a short talk given at the Philadelphia area Linux Users Group (PLUG) on March 2nd are on-line. The slides briefly cover xrandr (which can also be used to set the screen resolution), xset, xwd / xwud, xdotool, and xautomation including xte. You can get the slides and watch the video at my page on Automating X11 Keystrokes.

Posted by CJ Fearnley in FOSS Community, News, 1 comment
24
Feb
2011

Finding Help in Ubuntu (SCALE, Feb 25-7 in LA); Ubuntu Diversity; Debian Squeeze AKA 6.0

Here are some news items:

• Elizabeth Krumbach will give a talk on “Finding Help in Ubuntu” at UbuCon in Los Angeles

Tomorrow, February 25th at 9AM, LinuxForce Remote Responder Administrator Elizabeth Krumbach will give the opening talk at UbuCon at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport Hotel. Her talk is entitled Finding Help in Ubuntu. UbuCon is part of SCALE: Southern California Linux Expo which runs 2/25-2/27 2011.

• Elizabeth Krumbach interviewed in Linux Pro Magazine

Linux Pro Magazine interviewed LinuxForce Remote Responder Administrator Elizabeth Krumbach in an article on Ubuntu Increasing Its Diversity. Elizabeth is helping with the effort to increase diversity at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest in May.

• A new stable version of Debian known as Squeeze or 6.0 was released

The Debian project announced the release of Squeeze on 6 February 2011. eWeek reviewed the new release. We have already upgraded 3 systems and installed several new systems running Debian Squeeze. It is very reliable as we’ve come to expect from Debian.

In addition, the Debian web sites received a new design, a new “look”, that was released together with Squeeze. Check it out at http://www.debian.org.

Posted by CJ Fearnley in Conference, FOSS Community, News, 0 comments
13
Apr
2010

Attending the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010

On the heels of the 5th Annual Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference (ETE 2010) in Philadelphia that CJ attended last week, I’ll be attending the 4th Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit tomorrow through Friday in San Francisco.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is an exclusive, invitation-only summit gathering core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other community organizations for plenary sessions and workgroup meetings to meet face-to-face to tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today.

My attendance will be in my capacity as a member of the Ubuntu Community Council as well as my role as a Debian Systems Administrator. As such, my attention will be split at the summit between community and governance interests, like the FOSSBazaar Workgroup and Josh Berkus’ How to Prevent Community: Making Sure Your Pond Stays Small, and talks and panels like Does Open Source Mean Open Cloud? where Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth will be a panelist, and the Linux Standard Base Workgroup and Virtualization discussions.

It’s shaping up to be an exciting summit, if you are also attending be sure to say “Hello”!

Posted by Elizabeth Krumbach in Conference, Debian, FOSS Community, News, Ubuntu, 0 comments
06
Apr
2010

Anticipating the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise (ETE 2010) Event

I will be attending the 5th Annual Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference (ETE 2010) this Thursday and Friday, April 8-9, 2010. The event is billed for “developers, architects, and IT executives” and attempts to provide a dynamic forum for “emerging technology and Open Source”.

I look forward to seeing Robert C. (Uncle Bob) Martin‘s keynote on “Bad Code, Craftsmanship, Engineering, and Certification”, a panel discussion on “Open source is a commercial enterprise”, another panel on “Social Media: Why should I care?”, a second Bob Martin presentation on “Agility and Architecture”, Mary Poppendieck on “Cost Center Disease”, Bonnie Aumann on managing developers, Michael Coté’s keynote on “The Pragmatic Cloud”, Geir Magnusson Jr. on “Project Voldemort”, and Brian McCallister on “Failure Happens” (one of the very few talks on systems administration). Then there’s an interesting panel on “Battle of the Frameworks II” (its predecessor the ETE 2008 “Web Framework Shootout” is on-line in two parts I (here) and II (here). Hopefully this year people will respect each others’ frameworks more and have a mature discussion about the tradeoffs that each incurs. I was impressed with Marjan Bace, the moderator, for helping facilitate some reasonable comments amidst too much hyperbole and for brining the discussion to an effective conclusion). Finally, I think I’ll attend the presentations by Molly Holzschlag on “Demystifiying HTML5”, David A. Black on some CS (computer science) precepts, and Audrey Troutt on “Influencing your way to agile”.

It looks like it will be an engaging two-day event. I’m looking forward to meeting many leaders in the local Philly and broader FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) technology community and getting to downtown Philly for some out of the office learning and networking.

While I’m mentioning events, for those who do not know, I moderate the Q&A for the first Wednesday of the month meeting of the Philadelphia Linux User’s Group (PLUG) which will be on “Functional Programming Using Haskell” this month. It is going to be a busy week! If you plan to attend either event, I’ll see you there.

Posted by CJ Fearnley in FOSS Community, News, 2 comments